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Intuition is a funny thing. I'd been meaning to read Don DeLillo for years now, but was avoiding him. He appeared everywhere (usually accompanied by stellar praise), including my own bookshelf, where Libra sat and sat and sat. See, I've been intimidated by DeLillo. For no good reason, other than this intuitive idea I had that he would be difficult.

I was right, too. It took me weeks to read this book. Not because I didn't understand what was happening - but because I struggled, on a page-by-page basis, to connect to the material. DeLillo's writing style is both dense and cold. Added to this, a huge raft of characters to keep track of. The worst kind - FBI and CIA agents and their cronies, all of which get mixed into an annoying stew of interchangeableness. Plus, a constantly changing point of view, which wasn't a problem for me most recently in Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, but well, that book has so much heart and soul in it, you can't help but get swept up by its tide.

I should probably back up a bit to mention that this book is a fictionalized account of JFK's assassination, and the "Libra" in question is Lee Harvey Oswald, the famous would-be shooter (or patsy?). I should also mention that I was raised by a father who was 14 years old on that fateful day in Dallas, and I inherited his lifelong curiosity about what really happened. He's read all the books, he's watched all the documentaries and the films. I watched them alongside him, I listened to his thoughts and theories and questions. So I went into this reading fairly knowledgable about the event, and with the expectation that I would likely find it as riveting as my father would.

It would be unfair and wrong to overlook the incredible amount of background detail that went into this 450 page novel. DeLillo does a spectacular job of providing the reader with the who, what, where, why, how. It's not a small thing, and I felt appreciation and admiration for what he does in these pages, if not interest or enjoyment.

Well, that's not entirely true. My interest flared up each time LHO entered the scene, because he was so strange, such an unknowable outsider. So young, so unpredictable, so mediocre, so idealistic, so poor... and also now this historical figure who is known by all his given names. My interest peaked on the November 22 chapter. DeLillo captured the events in such a powerful, cinematic way, I found myself recalling the iconic film sequence almost frame by frame, my heart pounding and clenching as President Kennedy waved, and mouthed "thank you" in the moments before the bullets flew, seconds before his wife would be holding part of his brains in her hands.

I also found it interesting the way the author interpreted the assassination to be rooted in CIA dissatisfaction, post Bay of Pigs. I similarly enjoyed learning about Oswald's defection to the USSR, his marriage to a Russian woman, and the importance U-2 aircraft play in the story.

Yet... I struggled to feel engaged in these pages. For the most part, I experienced a huge emotional distance between me and the text. Perhaps this was a deliberate outcome on the part of the author, but in my view, it does a disservice to an event that has painfully lodged itself in the hearts of people, worldwide. An event that serves as a reminder that we can’t always know the answers. That idealism can be shattered. That everything can go to shit. It’s the broken heart of one of the great unsolved mysteries.

The heart was missing here, or hearts, of the man who was always on the outside, let down by his country, and of the man who was bravely leading it.